About Janet Whittle
Janet Whittle is a professional artist and qualified teacher who specializes in flowers and landscapes in watercolour and pastel. She exhibits regularly at the Westminster Galleries in London, and has also shown her work at the prestigious Mall Galleries and other international venues. Greeting cards bearing her work are widely available in Europe and the US and her prints are sold throughout the world. Janet has received awards from the major UK art groups, including the Society of Botanical Artists' Founder President's Honour in 1999, and the St. Cuthberts Mill Award for a picture of outstanding quality in 2001. Also in that year she won The Society of Flower Painters' Award for Excellence for their Jersey Exhibition. Visit her website www.janetwhittle.co.uk.
About Penny Brown
Penny has always worked as a professional artist. She trained as a theatre designer at the Central School of Art and Design in London, then worked in theatres all over the country, designing scenery and costumes for productions varying from Shakespeare and Mozart operas to Peter Pan and The Jungle Book. An increasing love of drawing and painting led her to illustration. She started with craft and lifestyle books, working on how-to diagrams, decorative borders and details in pen and ink and watercolour. She then began to write and illustrate design source books for Search Press with the most recent ones being Art Nouveau, Celtic Art and Maori Designs.
Penny also worked on books on gardening and natural history, and the latter especially started to fascinate her more and more. In 2009 she enrolled on the Distance Learning Course with the SBA (The Society of Botanical Artists), which greatly developed her observational and painting skills, and in 2011 she graduated with a distinction and won the Award for Excellence. Since then she has exhibited with the SBA at Westminster Central Hall in London as well as in Europe, and was accepted as a Full Member in March 2013. She is also a member of the Society of Floral Painters and has exhibited with the SWSBA in Somerset and shown her work as part of Dorset Art Week. In 2014 one of her paintings was chosen for an exhibition on Fresh Water in the museum at the Fundacion Cidade da Cultura de Galicia in Santiago de Compostella.
Over the years she has worked for a wide range of publishers as well as Search Press, including DK, Liberty’s, Reader’s Digest, Lorenz Books, Guild of Master Craftsmen and David and Charles. Her work has, to date, appeared in over 75 books.
She works in watercolour, pencil and sometimes pen and ink. Amongst her recent work is Botanical Drawings with Search Press (which has sold over 18,000 copies since 2018).
